The Duck of Minerva

Bill Petti

Petti is Associate Director of Insights and Analytics at Alexion . Previously, he served as Lead Data Scientist in the Decision Sciences group at Maritz Motivation and a Global Data Strategist and Subject Matter Expert for Gallup.

Recent Posts

Crowdsourcing Data Coding

by Bill Petti | 16 September, 2009 |

I just finished watching a video of CrowdFlower's presentation at the TechCrunch50 conference. CrowdFlower is a plaform that allows firms to crowdsource various tasks, such as populating a spreadsheet with email addresses or selecting stills from thousands of videos that have particular qualities. The examples in the video include very labor intensive tasks, but tasks that a firm is not likely to either need again or feels is worth dedicating staff to.As I was watching the video I thought about the potential to leverage such a platform for large-scale coding of qualitative data. In the...

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The ‘Soft Sciences’ to get their Day?

by Bill Petti | 12 September, 2009 |

In a recent report, Garnter proposes that as corporations try to benefit from the growth of social media they will come to rely more and more on employees with formal, advanced training in the social sciences.Gartner Vice President Kathy Harris discusses in some detail four areas of jobs needed in the near future. Though she never really uses the words "social networks" the implication is that most companies aren't really geared toward taking advantage of the impact of these online communities, and that the numbers will be too large to ignore, regardless of the business you are in.“Many of...

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Post hoc ergo propter hoc

by Bill Petti | 29 August, 2009 |

I am usually a fan of Charles Blow's work, but his latest op-ed seems to me a bit sloppy.Blow claims that one reason Democrats, and President Obama in particular, may be having trouble convincing the country to sign on to large-scale health care reform is due to the public's overall lack of trust in the government. This is a completely plausible hypothesis and one that I agree with, as the numbers regarding trust are incredibly low right now (~20%). What I take issue with is the way Blow points out a "peculiar quirk of recent American politics"; namely, that American's trust in government...

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The Complexities of Signaling

by Bill Petti | 28 August, 2009 |

Adam Elkus from Rethinking Security tweets about a recent critique of the current US strategy of strategic communication in the Muslim world. The critique was penned by non other than Admiral Mike Mullen, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen's contention is that efforts by the US to counter propaganda from Islamic militants is doomed to fail unless more attention is paid to the outcomes of US policies on the ground:“To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate,” Admiral Mullen wrote in...

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Better Political Forecasts through Crowdsourcing

by Bill Petti | 26 August, 2009 |

Dan Drezner links to a recent article by Philip Tetlock on the difficult business of political forecasting. His evaluation of this troubled pastime is accomplished through the review of three recent books that all claim to provide a better way to see the future of politics. His own research (Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, a fantastic book that you really should read) offers solid reasons to be skeptical of any pronouncements by 'experts' that they have some kind of proprietary knowledge about the future.While I think his critique of the three books and of...

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Piracy as a Signal of Value?

by Bill Petti | 23 August, 2009 |

[Cross posted at bill | petti)Christopher Penn crafts an interesting piece arguing that piracy (i.e. copyright infringement) is, among other things, a market signal:Piracy indicates that something is sufficiently valuable enough that it’s worth stealing. It’s worth making an illegal copy and spreading without compensating the creator.Do you want the most accurate, unbiased, unmanipulated measure of how popular and valuable something is? Go hit up a site like The Pirate Bay or Demonoid or any of the other file sharing services and see if someone is stealing it.Now, I think this is an...

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Breakdown of Troop-Contractor Distribution in Iraq and Afghanistan

by Bill Petti | 22 August, 2009 |

Today's Wall Street Journal notes that the number of private military contractors (PMCs) current outnumbers the number of military personnel serving in Afghanistan, and the numbers are extremely close in Iraq:A few points to make:The data illustrate that with the troop surge in Afghanistan has come a slight uptick in the number of PMCs, but overall contractors have far outnumbered troops in that theater. What the article does not discuss is the distribution of duties and roles for PMCs and how that may have shifted over the past few years. I'd be interested to see how fallout from various...

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Bolton needs to re-read Arms and Influence

by Bill Petti | 9 August, 2009 |

Sandeep Baliga of Cheap Talk channels Schelling to point out how skewed John Bolton's understanding of foreign affairs is:...John Bolton thinks every international interaction is the game of Chicken, not just the recent episode with North Korea. Schelling thought a lot about Chicken and here is what he said in Arms and Influence in 1966: Is a Berlin Crisis…..mainly bilateral competition in which each side should be motivated mainly towards winning over the other? Or is it a shared danger – a case of both being pushed to the brink of war – in which statesmanlike forbearance, collaborative...

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Branching Out

by Bill Petti | 3 August, 2009 |

Faithful Duck readers:So, I've launched a new blog. While I will still be writing on global politics here at The Duck of Minerva from time to time, I wanted another place to comment and brainstorm on business issues, technology, innovation, and other related topics. (Sometimes the 140 characters of Twitter just doesn't cut it).As I’ve moved outside of academia my interests have shifted--or more accurately, broadened--to include topics such as business, innovation, technology, and social media. The Duck is really a vehicle for commenting on global politics from an analytical and academic...

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